(A Net Ethology / A Troll's Confection)

 When a person's sanity is at balance,
 when human passion is raging,
 no etiquette must get in the way.
     —Xah Lee, 2001.

The internet has changed society deeply. It has indirectly changed nations, catapulted sciences, deeply imbued the daily lives of men, and as well affected writings and have created a culture one of a kind, among which is FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), Netiquette, and Trolling. Netiquette refers to Net Etiquette. It is the implicit rules in online communities, widely purveyed in the early days of internet (pre-1997) but faded quietly with the mainstreaming of internet. Troll roughly refers to someone who posts a message that solicit outwardly or indirectly a huge usually chaotic following. In these pages, are collected essays on these phenomena.

I as a troll is rather special because i tend to put a final say on things, in contrast with one-liner trolls i myself despise. (In a sense i'm an anti-troll, untroll, or an atrocious atroll.) At first i balked at being branded a troll. Now i revel it. I as a troll is rather recent, beginning and getting worse about in 1998. I have been using online forums since 1990. Perhaps one day i'll write “how i became a troll”. It is bound to be a tragedy. 
—Xah Lee, 2002.

I'll find a day to massacre them all, And raze their faction and their family… 
    —William Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus

All i wanted, is to make Space and Tab and Newline chars visible.

However, the emacs whitespace-mode does much more than that. It is designed for tech geeking control freaks to tune every aspect of white space in his source code. The mode is filled with bells and whistles. It distinguishes tabs mixed with spaces, EOLs mixed with spaces, EOLs at beginning of file, EOLs at end of file, run on spaces at end of line, lines that has nothing to do with white spaces but is simply longer than 80 chars, etc. Each of these is rendered with different foreground, background, colors, so that they cannot possibly escape the notices of control freaks.